Reina Gossett + Dean Spade - Part 2 - Practicing prison abolition everyday

Dean: As somebody who cares about people who are currently in prisons and immigration prisons and various facilities, how do you feel you balance a commitment abolition and a commitment to people's immediate needs inside those facilities or at the hands of the cops? That kind of, one of the questions I think people ask a lot is how do immediate reforms relate to the project of abolition and is there a conflict? Reina: Right, so this is a question that we always used to talk about when I was at Critical Resistance. And last year there was a ten year gathering for Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence to examine the statement that they wrote together about stopping interpersonal violence with a framework of abolition, with a framework of abolishing prisons, police, jails, and detention centers, forensic institutions, psychiatric institutions. And this question came up. So a person asked Rose Braz who was a staff person at Critical Resistance, "You know, I'm working with a lot of people who would really like to see the gay unit at Rikers re-opened. They found that they had a level of safety inside the gay unit at Rikers and it doesn't exist anymore. And I'm an abolitionist and I know that we don't want to expand the scope of the prison industrial complex - there's no safety within prisons or jails, they're inherently not safe places. The only way to guarantee someone's safety is to get them out. To organize to get people out." And Rose Braz and Andrea Richie who were both on the panel - it was interesting to see their different vantage points on the issue. Rose was saying there's no guarantee that if the gay unit is opened that it will be any safer. Because prisons and jails are inherently violent structures. Even a place that has a little less violence - it doesn't mean it's going to stay that way. And inevitably, when you create or expand the prison system it always - the logic of the prison industrial complex demands overcrowding, demands more bodies to fill those spaces. So if a new unit is opened, a new structure is opened, it's immediately going to have the same problems as the old unit, the old structure. And Rose gave some examples of that. And then Andrea Richie had a different point about how it's really important to organize for abolition, it's vital that we're closing these structures and not building new ones imagining that that's a solution. And at the same time, constantly hearing from people, "Yes, this is important, get me out. But also, maybe you could organize to make sure the lights in my cell are turned off for one hour (at least) a day. Because I'm in a cell where the lights are always on and I'm not sleeping. And this is really traumatic and torturous. This is incredibly violent. Yes, I want to abolish this structure, and I want to get out, but I also want to sleep." You know, and I think that it's particularly challenging, especially for people who are coming from a place that hasn't traditionally been held within abolitionist movements. So *** and trans people and *** and trans lives - the more dominant abolitionist movements, in my experience, have not been held in the same kind of way. It's been a teaching moment. You know, people are shifting and understanding how vital it is that trans people, particularly trans women of color and low income trans people, are at the forefront of movements for abolition. Especially because we're navigating disproportionate levels of violence. And listening to what people are saying on the inside about what would make people feel a little bit safer, while other people are organizing to get them out. So I thought that was a really interesting point that Andrea said. And there's a tension there, right? So we don't want to create a new unit, imgagining that it's going to be safer. Because that's the logic - the logic of the prison industrial complex demands new units and it's never safer. But we also want to make sure that people - when they're saying, "Actually, it would be great for you to organize for me to be able to sleep at night so I can be part of these, part of this movement," that we take that as seriously as people on the outside saying we need to abolish something. So I think it's just like other questions that come up in these conversations about what do you do - that there is no right answer. There's no the one answer. It's a constant negotiation, it's a constant figuring out what to do. But the principle that I use in those moments is the people most impacted in the situation should be the people making the decisions about what to do, how we can mobilize on their behalf. And part of that is the principle of self determination. The people most impacted by violence are powerful and capable to transform the world. And part of that is about, going back to what you were saying about conscioiusness-raising, you know people who are most impacted by violence aren't necessarily always going to say, "Let's get rid of the prisons. Let's get rid of the jails." Sometimes they're going to say, "Let's have more black police. Let's have a trans cop. I would feel safer in a trans jail." You know, so part of it is consciousness-raising, and really asking these questions, "Why would you feel safer in a trans jail? Why would you feel safer with a trans police officer or a black police officer, frisking you, murdering you, controlling your life?" And then really getting down to hearing what that person is saying, without a level of condescension, imagining that we're always holding the most radical position. But really trying to hear where that person is coming from and negotiating that with the politics of abolition and the politics of transformation. Does that answer your question? Dean: Yeah - it's interesting what you're saying about Rose's point about, you know, there's no guarantee that this space will be any safer. It'll probably just be more like the spaces - it'll operate by the same rules as the spaces that already exist. That's interesting to me specifically on the question of the queens tank at Rikers, because I had experiences of having clients who experienced really high levels of violence in there, and I also had clients who thought it was a better place to be. And so I think there's also a dilemma, when we ask people most directly affected - we can never get a perfect answer to that. And so I often figure out - feel like what we're trying to do is shift the conversation to be like why do people end up in Rikers most often, and what could we do to prevent them from getting to Rikers? And could everybody potentially agree or see that - if it's an increased access to shelter, if it's decreased policing - what are the things that would make people not go at all? Like it might be hard for us to agree on whether or not this could ever be a safe space, or a safer space, and that might depend a lot on people's specific identities, on who was working the day they were there or the days they were there, I mean - so many things. Reina: Who was also there the day they were there... Dean: So many things. But we might be able to move our conversation still to incredibly concrete set of practices and reforms that will actually provide relief from the violence, but at an earlier space in the pipeline towards imprisonment. And I think that's one of things - I think sometimes abolition is cast as unrealistic, or like a too faraway dream - as opposed to, to me it's a set of principles about how we deal with really thorny problems like this, that help guide us through to figure out really, what will produce the least harm? What's the pathway that will reduce the violence as much as possible? Reina: And I think there's a lot invested, I think the state is heavily invested people believing that abolition is a faraway dream and that it's a long off vision. And that the state is heavily invested in this binary of people saying, "Ok, that's great, you want to get rid of prisons, you want to get rid of jails. But what about right now? What about my life right now?" As if that is two separate, distinct problems, you know? Prisons and jails being demolished and life right now aren't two separate things. They're a part of one person's whole life. And I think the state is really invested in this logic that abolition is a dream. And then people break it down all the time, you know? Andrea was talking about, on that panel that we were on together, how people act with abolitionist politics all the time without actually knowing it, and used a kind of interesting example which is not necessarily one that always comes to my mind for a number of reasons, but she was saying, you know - you and your friend are at a bar. Your friend drove there. Your friend wants to drive home. Are you going to call the cops, or are you going to say, "No. I'll drive you home, I'll call a cab, I'll take your keys." You know what I mean? So that's abolitionism at work. People are not constantly calling the cops on their friends to prevent them from drunk driving. People are finding unique and creative ways to get their friends not driving when they're drunk. And I thought that, that really broke it down, you know, because my experience with day-to-day abolition looks a little differently based on where I'm located and situated and depending on the the year. For a while I was working with Safe Outside the System, which is part of the Audre Lorde Project. They were building these safe spaces (and continue to) in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, and Crown Heights, where people who are experiencing violence ca go into that coffee shop, go into the laundromat, go into the bodega, and know that, that bodega owner, the laundromat owner, the manager of the coffee shop isn't going to call the police to solve the problem. But is also going to support the person who is surviving the violence in that moment. And I think that's particularly important because they're working with people who are *** and trans and LGBT and gender-nonconforming and genderqueer, knowing that you know, even if a cop was called, a lot of times those situations shift so fast, right? So the person surviving violence is now a target of police violence on top of having to navigate and survive street-based harassment and harm. And I thought that was a really brilliant way to think about how we can practice abolition everyday in these moments. And then also there's the bar example, right? You don't call the cops on your friend who wants to drunk drive. Dean: Yeah. It seems like a big part of an example like that is the difference between how we feel about somebody we know, like - you're about to commit a crime, you're about to get in a car and drive drunk, but I - it never occurs to me that I should call the cops on you. Because I don't see you as disposable. I know you. Versus, you know, they're strangers in the subway and someone is doing something that someone doesn't like. Instead of sort of figuring out what's going on, or can this be stopped, or can this be less harmful, or can people get taken care of? There's a kind of immediate - make this get out of my sight. I want a world where I don't have to see this kind of thing. You know there's a set of very racialized and gendered and ableist understandings that allow people to make something a police problem. And also, I think the ways in which people are just alienated from one another in our culture, that it's like not ok to connect and try to figure out how to help solve the problem. Reina: Yeah, there's a lot invested in us not connecting with each other.